By Kerry D. Soper

Walt Kelly (1913-1973) is among the most valuable and leading edge American cartoonists of the 20th century. His long-running Pogo newspaper strip has been pointed out by way of sleek comics artists and students as the best ever. Cartoonists invoice Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes), Jeff Smith (Bone), and Frank Cho (Liberty Meadows) have all pointed out Kelly as a tremendous effect on their paintings. along Uncle Scrooge’s Carl Barks and Krazy Kat’s George Herriman, Kelly is well-known as a genius of “funny animal” comics.

We pass Pogo is the 1st complete learn of Kelly's sketch paintings and his higher profession within the comics enterprise. writer Kerry D. Soper examines all elements of Kelly's career---from his highschool drawings; his paintings on such lively Disney videos as Dumbo, Pinocchio, and Fantasia; and his Thirties editorial cartoons for Life, and the New York usher in Tribune. Soper faucets Kelly's large own correspondence and interivews with kin, neighbors, and cartoonists to create a fancy portrait of 1 of the artwork form's real geniuses.

From Pogo’s inception in 1948 until eventually Kelly’s demise, the artist mixed outstanding draftsmanship, slapstick humor, fierce social satire, and creative discussion and dialects. He used the adventures of his animals―all denizens of the Okefenokee Swamp―as a way to touch upon American and overseas politics and cultural mores. The strip lampooned Senator Joseph McCarthy through the top of McCarthyism, the loo Birch Society in the course of the Nineteen Sixties, Fidel Castro through the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and lots of others.

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Additional info for We Go Pogo: Walt Kelly, Politics, and American Satire

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In a move that would have probably made him unpopular with the strikers, Kelly secretly crossed the picket lines before he left to meet with Walt Disney himself; in this interview he apparently secured work on the East Coast with the Dell Western publishing company—an organization not directly a part of the Disney corporation, but affiliated through a series of Disney comic books (Andrae and Blum 131). That secret meeting with Disney is especially intriguing to imagine considering the radically different political paths each man followed in subsequent years: Disney aligning himself with the anti-Communist paranoia of the early 1950s, testifying against the animators’ union leaders and other alleged Hollywood “subversives,” and Kelly, on the other side, emerging as one of the few satirists willing to publicly challenge McCarthy and the general witchhunting hysteria of those same years.

Kelly originally sold himself as a gag and story man at Disney, and was thus assigned to the storyboard department. He worked here for several years on a series of short pieces that were never produced. It is not clear why his work was passed over, but in 1937 he was transferred over to the animation division. Here Kelly excelled at creating clever visual gags, but struggled with the “inbetweening” assigned to junior animators. “In-betweening” required that he refer to model sheets (the template of how a character should look and move in various situations) in order to imitate the style of the senior animators, and walt kelly’s biography and a general history of pogo generally make the figures move fluidly.

Pogo, 30 May 1953. 4: Walt Kelly, “Makin’ dern fools of ourselves . . ,” Pogo, 2 June 1953. A year later, on 18 August 1954, Malarkey resurfaced again and attempted to reintroduce his campaign of terror into the swamp. This cameo lasted for two months and included some especially vivid images of the bobcat running through the swamp with a fish-sack on his head, making him resemble a member of the Ku Klux Klan. In 1954, Kelly also lampooned the senator in a short graphic novel based on the Lewis Carroll’s court-room scene from Alice in Wonderland; this allowed Kelly to satirize McCarthy’s antics in front of the Senate committees.

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